Hasta La Gadget!

It was fun while it lasted, right? All of that talk of giving up on Earth and just starting over again with a new planet, some 20 light years away. Hopefully you didn’t burn any irreparable bridges late last month when scientists announced the existence of Gliese581g, a so-called “Goldilocks” planet that was theoretically the right size and distance from the sun to potentially support human life.

Turns out that Gliese581g may actually just be a whole lot of noise–quite literally, in fact. During a meeting of the International Astronomical Union this week, Geneva-based astronomer Francesco Pepe questioned the existence of the planet, stating, “despite the extreme accuracy of the instrument and the many data points, the signal amplitude of this potential fifth planet is very low and basically at the level of the measurement noise.”

Pepe isn’t willing to rule out the possibility that the existence of the “planet” is, in fact, just an error. “Simulations on the real data have shown that the probability that such a signal is just produced ‘by chance’ out of the noise is not negligible, of the order of several percents,” he told the organization. “Under these conditions we cannot confirm the presence of the announced planet Gliese 581g.”

In the meantime, I’d hold off from destroying our own planet as much as possible–you know, just in case…

Poor, poor Mark Zuckerberg can’t catch a break. First Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher team up to make a movie that portrays him as kind of a, well, let’s just use the word “punk”–that’s what the bus stop posters say, so we’ll just go with that.

Now the paparazzi is running around, snapping shots of him, while he’s just minding his own business, texting while walking down a “busy street.” Okay, sure, it’s not the safest thing in the world, but let’s face it, most of us do it at some point, right?

The Daily Mail has a bunch of shots of Zuckerberg walking down the street near his home in Northern California, frantically texting his little billionaire heart out, if that’s the sort of thing you’re into.

They suggest that Zuckerberg is such a workaholic that he just can’t put the phone down. Now we’re just going to suggest that he’s actually do something else, like playing Farmville or update his MySpace profile, but I think it’s best not to rule that out entirely.

I saw my first shattered iPhone 4 over the weekend. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Someone sitting on the steps at Union Square in Manhattan told us a horror story about getting out a cab and losing control of his precious new handset. He pull the iPhone out of his pocket, and it was a sad sight indeed, completely shattered–on both sides.

According to a report from third-party warranty provider SquareTrade, the latest version of Apple’s handset is a good deal more likely to shatter than its predecessor. In the first four months since the handset’s release, the company has reported an 82-percent increase in the number of damaged screens vs. the 3Gs.

The overall accident rate for the device was up, as well–68 percent. According to the company’s numbers, some 15.5 percent of iPhone owners will have an accident within the first year.

“The aluminosilicate glass seem to crack at least as often as the old glass,” according to SquareTrade. The problem here really seems to be the fact that both sides of the device are made out of glass now, meaning that there’s a very real chance that the thing will crack, no matter which side you drop it on.

This article was written on April 02, 2006 by CyberNet.

Google has added even more modules for you to use on your Google Personalized Homepage. Now, when you click to “Add Content” on your Personalized Homepage it will take you to the module directory. They have also added the ability to search for a module but the hardest thing for me to figure out was how to add a RSS feed. The screenshot I took above shows what it looks like when you click on the “Advanced Options” next to the search button. Once you click on the Advanced Options you are then able to enter in a feed.

Also, our site has been going through some changes and some upgrades. There has been no downtime so far and we are almost complete, so you shouldnt’ have to worry about that. Within the next few weeks we also hope to have a new header for our site.

Google Personalized Homepage Modules

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

Google Adds A Lot More Personalized Homepage ModulesFirefox Extension Puts Personalized Homepage In SidebarGoogle Is Working On Tabs For Your Personalized HomepageWhat Would a Google Homepage Look Like with Yahoo’s Layout?Google Lets Users Customize Mobile Homepage

The innocuously-named FileBrowser is an iPad app which lets you access files on your computer over the local network or the internet. This is a function shared by roughly one zillion other apps in the store. What makes FileBrowser different is that it can access network-attached storage (NAS), letting you stream video and music to your iPad from a Time Capsule or other network drive without switching on a computer.

The app will connect to Macs, Windows PCs and NAS devices via SMB sharing. There is some setup involved, but the app comes loaded with PDFs which walk you through step-by-step. I grabbed it so I could stream files from a hard-drive hooked up to my Time Capsule, a feature added in the latest version of the app. It was easy.

All you need to do is give FileBrowser the name of the Time Capsule (or Airport Extreme base station), along with your user name and password. That’s it. Over an 802.11n connection you can drill down into the internal and external drives as fast as if they were local storage, and clicking on a compatible video file will play it right there in the app, with the standard media-control buttons.

The trick is that the movie files need to be in the right format. If it would sync to the iPad via iTunes and play in the “Videos” app, then you’re good to go. This means you’ll have to convert movies before using this solution: If you want to stream and convert movies on the fly, you’ll still need a computer running something like the excellent Air Video.

However, if you have a movie-playing app like CineXPlayer installed, you can choose to open AVI and other movie formats with that instead. These don’t stream, though: FileBrowser downloads them first.

FileBrowser will also work with any file that iOS can recognize, and can hand those files off to other apps. It costs $3, which is $3 you’ll save in weeks by keeping your computer switched off.

FileBrowser app page [iTunes]

See Also:

• How To: Watch Any Video on iPad, No Conversion Required
• Free App Plays AVI Movies on iPad
• Hands-On With VLC Movie Player for iPad
• Hands-On with Air Video, Stream Video to iPad, iPhone

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.